Cancer is a significant health problem despite the many advances made for detecting and treating this disease. Current strategies for managing cancer rely on early diagnosis and aggressive treatment. Treatment options often include surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, or a combination thereof. While such therapies provide a benefit to many patients, there is still a need for better therapeutic agents to treat various types of cancer.
Prostate cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer are leading causes of cancer-related death. Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer among males, with an estimated incidence of 30% in men over the age of 50. Moreover, clinical evidence indicates that human prostate cancer has the propensity to metastasize to bone, and the disease appears to progress inevitably from androgen dependent to androgen refractory status, leading to increased patient mortality. Breast cancer remains a leading cause of death in women. Its cumulative risk is relatively high; certain reports indicate that approximately one in eight women are expected to develop some type of breast cancer by age 85 in the United States. Likewise, lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death, and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for about 80% of these cases. Attempts to use serum protein markers for the early diagnosis of lung cancer have not yielded satisfactory results for routine screening, and newly developed early diagnostic methods using serum DNA as a diagnostic marker await further validation.
Accordingly, there is a need for new treatment regimes to treat these and other cancers. The present invention fulfills this need and provides other related advantages.